War of words

From
Geoff Pullum, Professor of general linguistics, University of Edinburgh

David Robson’s feature “‘Sno myth” was subtitled&colon; “Eskimos really do have at least 50 words for snow” (22/29 December 2012, p 72). He wrote that anthropologist Franz Boas “sparked off the claim” about Eskimoan languages having numerous snow words; that “most linguists considered it an urban legend”; and that Smithsonian researcher Igor Krupnik and colleagues have refuted the linguists, suggesting that “Boas was right all along”.

However, Boas never made the numerosity claim. He simply noted that different languages draw different concept boundaries&colon; one, like English, might distinguish running water (river) from still water (lake); another, like Inuit, might …